A chatbot is a conversational robot and as its name suggests, you can talk to it. It is a product of artificial intelligence, a virtual assistant that helps companies improve their customer relationship management. This technology is not new and the first chatbots were created in the 1950s. They were small pieces of software that made it possible to perform tasks automatically. Today, the tool seems essential to the customer relationship of e-commerce platforms.

How Does a Chatbot Work?

Before you determine the objective of chatbot project, you should first know how does it work. The current chatbot has some specific improvements that greatly simplify its use which is defined by the materialization of the purchase of a product or service on an e-commerce site. Concretely, like a real marketing agent, the role of a chatbot is to receive and process any order more simply and quickly. They are then called transactional chatbot.

A chatbot is also a very practical customer support because it remains reachable 7 days a week and 24 hours a day for the most part. Therefore, customers and prospects can use it to obtain simple information, latest news about the brand, after-sales service, etc. These are what we call conversational bots. Lately, there are chatbots applied to the field of smart speakers and other smart assistants named voicebots.

Originally, chatbots used question-and-answer libraries to chat with users. But thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, chatbots 2.0 are now equipped with a high capacity for analysis and understanding of the messages transmitted to them. Some chatbots even have a machine learning ability. This is made possible thanks to natural language processing technologies (NLP).

Pros and Cons of a Chatbot

Pre-trained by a dedicated team, a virtual assistant allows companies to display a presence on the most popular messaging platforms. It also offers a simplified user experience, without downloading any application. With this type of tool, users can access a direct, personalized, one-to-one conversation with brands. In addition, it has the advantage of being available 24/7 which represents a significant saving of time in terms of online shopping.

However, chatbots, which are mostly dedicated to adapting to the personality of users, require good training to better manage slippages and other possible incidents online. On the other hand, since the capacity of these virtual assistants is still very limited, they risk blocking the purchasing process for certain users who will always have a preference for human contact.